During the last year or so, I have been reading a lot more for pleasure, and also listening to audio books from Audible.

A young French lecturer, who taught me years ago, once revealed her method of reading Henry Miller, on whose works she was writing her thesis: she would simply open a novel at any page and perform a textual analysis of a few of the pages that followed.

This is not unlike my listening to audio books, for I fall asleep, and awake an hour or so later to hear the voice continuing. I listen back and forth in a complex architecture of browsing. The good literature stands up to such rigours, and eventually I manage to tease out the story, and its beauty.

So, too, with reminiscing and examination of memories. They are jumbled, each with their own life and interplay, wormholes and straight lines. They go back and forth continuously to reveal that life is not a tapestry; rather, it is nothing nearly as well ordered or tightly woven.

It is more like an unexplored building, with recesses and passages and expansive balconies embracing a magnificent view or a fathomless void.

The building has the contorted architecture of dreams. It is not site-specific; it is at once everywhere and nowhere, familiar and foreign. And, like a dream it must be grasped – appreciated in the moment, otherwise it disappears and is rarely revisited, for the river which runs by it transports you elsewhere.